Took a few days off to visit the city of my birth — Chicago. Met up with an old friend, a New Mexican by birth, who somehow had something go tragically wrong in his life and wound up being a Cubs fan. But he’d never been to Wrigley Field and I told him I’d go — assuming I could find it.

Given that I am a native South Sider, a White Sox fan, and I am precluded from setting foot in Wrigley Field, I made an exception for friendship. So I went with him. The Cubs did not disappoint.

Playing the Twins in inter-league play, they showed what true Cubness means when Milton Bradley, the Cubs right fielder, first lost a ball in the sun in one inning and in the next inning topped it with a display of Cubness you rarely get to see in person.

With Twins runners all over the bases, Bradley caught a fly ball and with great flare and elan tossed the ball into the stands, the ritual of all outfielders after the third out.

The problem of course was that it wasn’t the third out. It was the second out, and Twins runners ran and ran, and Cub fans booed and booed, and the next day the Sun-Times had a fine headline over a photo of the right fielder: “Err Head.”

Perfect Cubness. You can’t help but admire it.

Chicago is a great city. You should go. It has much more to offer than the Cubs (the Chicago Institute of Art, for example; the food; the architecture; the lakefront; the energy of just being in the midst of it all; and of course the music — we managed to drop in on the weekend of the Chicago blues festival in Grant Park).

So now it’s home again, and glad of it. Road trips are good, but they have limits, time expirations, when the adventure begins to sour a little, like milk left out too long. Home always sweetens things up.